Bias and Affective Polarization

Bias and Affective Polarization Daniel F. Stone Bowdoin College September 2016∗ Abstract I propose a model of affective polarization (\that both Republicans and Democrats increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents," Iyengar et al, 2012). In the model, two agents repeatedly choose actions based on private interests, the social good, their own \character" (willingness to trade private for social gains) and beliefs about the other agent's character. Each agent could represent a political party, or the model could apply to other settings, such as spouses or business partners. Each agent Bayesian updates beliefs about the other's character, and dislikes the other more when its character is perceived as more self-serving. I characterize the dynamic and long-run effects of three biases: a prior bias against the other agent's character, the false consensus bias, and limited strategic thinking. Prior bias against the opponent remains constant or dissipates over time, and actions do not diverge. By contrast, the other two biases, which are not directly related to character, cause actions to become more extreme over time and repeatedly be \worse" than expected, causing affective polarization|even when both players are arbitrarily \good" (unselfish). For some parameter values, long-run affective polarization is unbounded, despite Bayesian updating. The results imply that affective polarization can be caused by cognitive bias, and that subtlety and unawareness of bias are key forces driving greater severity of this type of polarization. Keywords: affective polarization, partyism, polarization, disagreement, dislike, over-precision, unawareness, media bias JEL codes: D72; D83 ∗I thank Steven J. Miller, Dan Wood, Gaurav Sood, Dan Kahan, Roland Bénabou, Andrei Shleifer, and participants at seminars at the University of Western Ontario, Wake Forest University and Southern Methodist University, in particular Saltuk Ozerturk, Tim Salmon, Bo Chen, James Lake, Al Slivinski, Greg Pavlov, and Charles Zheng, for helpful comments and discussion. This paper was written while I visited the University of Virginia's Department of Economics; I am grateful for their hospitality. Email: [email protected]. \Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding." - AndréGide 1 Introduction Has the US become more politically polarized in the last several decades? Yes, definitely, with respect to legislative voting; see Figure 1. No, not necessarily, in that political scientists have debated ideological polarization of the general public for years and have yet to reach consensus on this topic.1 The common intuition that the US general public has indeed become more polarized has recently received stronger empirical support, however. A new literature has emerged docu- menting relatively strong and unambiguous evidence of mass affective polarization|that rank and file partisans have grown to dislike members of the out-party more over time (independent of whether their ideologies or true policy preferences have diverged).2 Affective polarization has likely contributed to further exacerbating party-line voting and political gridlock, as well as other social and political problems.3 The political science literature typically attributes affective polarization to growth in \social distance" between the parties (see, e.g., Iyengar and Westwood, 2015). This idea, put briefly, is that it is human nature to automatically dislike others who are different from our- selves, and that there has been a perceived growth in differences between the parties over time. Some papers in this literature stress the importance of strengthened partisan identity and social identity theory (Mason, 2015). Another prominent theory is increasingly vitriolic partisanship in the media environment and political advertising (Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar, 2015). A related literature from political psychology focuses on the evolutionary adaptiveness 1See Abramowitz and Saunders (2008) and Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope (2008) for competing arguments, and Hill and Tausanovitch (forthcoming) for more recent analysis and discussion of the lack of consensus. 2Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes (2012) first coined the term affective polarization. Important later papers in- clude Rogowski and Sutherland (2015) and Mason (2015). The trend seems to continue; when announc- ing the suspension of his presidential campaign, Marco Rubio said, \[Modern politics is] going to leave us as a nation where people literally hate each other because they have different political opinions." (See http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-prez-marco-rubio-speech-transcript-20160315-story.html.) While the US context is the focus of this paper, partisan polarization is of course not unique to the US; the analysis of this paper may also apply to polarization in other contexts. For example, the recent debate over Brexit became so heated as to cause numerous violent incidents. 3See, e.g., Hetherington and Rudolph (2015) for discussion of how affective polarization could exacerbate gridlock. See Mann and Ornstein (2013) and Barber and McCarty (2015) for detailed discussion of potentially harmful welfare effects of partisan voting and gridlock. 2 Figure 1: US House of Representatives voting network graphs, adapted from Andris, Lee, Hamilton, Martino, Gunning, and Selden (2015). Red nodes are Republicans, blue nodes Democrats, and the lines connecting nodes and positions of nodes indicate voting similarity. of tribalism and motivated reasoning (Haidt, 2012). But the phenomenon of escalation of extremism of actions and hostility building on one another is not limited to partisan settings. This pattern occurs all too often in a variety of contexts with repeated bilateral interactions, such as spouses, friends, and business partners. The fact that these settings do not involve opposing social groups, media exposure, or mo- tivation to believe in the opposition's inferiority, implies that these are not crucial factors underlying this behavior.4 In this paper, I study a novel (but intuitive) explanation for affective polarization across contexts: cognitive bias.5 Recent research in psychology, neuroscience and even philosophy, ar- gues that interpersonal feelings, and emotions more broadly, are not in fact \non-cognitive"| rather, they reflect information, judgments, and beliefs, conscious or otherwise.6 In the context 4Moreover, the within-party conflicts that have occurred in the current (2016) presidential election campaign, in both parties, also point against the partisan identity theory. 5In addition to the literatures referred to above, the social psychology literature, perhaps due to its focus on social identity, appears to largely neglect the subject of within-group conflict and the effects of cognitive bias on interpersonal relationship problems and (unjustified) dislike. I am not aware of work showing the link between the biases studied in psychology most directly related to inference about personal characteristics, the fundamental attribution error and correspondence bias, and inter-party hostility or escalation of conflict in relationships in general. See, for example, Epley (2014) for an informal overview of related psychology research on misperceptions of thoughts of other people, including some discussion of how these misperceptions can lead to conflict. The specialized literature on non-group related hate seems to also largely neglect the role of bias (Rempel and Sutherland, 2016). 6Recent work in psychology and neuroscience supports the view that emotional and cognitive processes are not as distinct as previously believed. Haidt (2012) refers to \a prevalent but useless dichotomy between cognition and emotion;" Pessoa (2008) says \parcelling the brain into cognitive and affective regions is inher- 3 of partisan politics, hostility toward the out-party is caused in large part by beliefs about why the out-party should be disliked. Moreover, both common sense and research imply that such beliefs in this context are likely biased|that, more generally, when large groups of people perceive other large groups to be inferior and contemptible, these perceptions are likely off- base (Graham, Nosek, and Haidt, 2012). Even in settings involving just two individuals, the hostility is often based on misunderstanding and skewed beliefs.7 Connecting the dots—unjustified dislike is based on skewed beliefs, cognitive bias causes skewed beliefs, thus cognitive bias likely causes dislike|is fairly straightforward. Still, it is unclear which bias or biases have such an effect, to what extent, and why. As alluded to above, there is little existing work studying this issue, either empirically or theoretically. In this paper, I propose and study a model to obtain a more precise and deeper theoretical understanding of these relationships. In particular, I examine the effects of three distinct biases to see which yield outcomes consistent with the two key empirical facts mentioned above for the case of the major parties in the US: 1) increasing extremism of actions over time; 2) increasing dislike of the opposition. Other key questions addressed by the analysis are: how often does affective polarization occur|can it occur even for \good" players|and what is the magnitude of this polarization. In the model, there are two agents, L and R (left and right). I interpret the model as representing the political context, but the model could apply to other ongoing bilateral relationships. The agents have different interests: L directly benefits from higher levels of a variable, x, and R benefits from lower

Load more